Honey Girl(65)

“Hey,” Mom says quietly. She brings Grace in close. “Let’s go sit, huh? That’ll be good. That’ll be good, Gracie.” Gracie, like she’s a kid again.

They end up under a grove tree, one that’s been nearly cleared of all the fallen fruit beneath it. Mom leans back against the trunk, and Grace falls into her lap.

She is like a child all over again.

“Shhh,” Mom says, running gentle fingers over her back. “You’ll get yourself all worked up. Just calm down.”

“I messed it all up,” Grace cries. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Jesus.” She wipes her nose, feels the burning and stinging of it. “I’m—I’m—”

“What?” Mom asks quietly. “Tell me. Go on.”

“I’m lost,” she sobs. “I don’t know what I’m doing, and I hate it.” It comes up like black sludge, like tar. It’s been buried, and it comes up now. “I hate not having things figured out.” She shivers, even in the warm morning. “I should be trying harder. I hate that even now I just want things to be perfect. I hate myself for thinking they need to be that way.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom says. She leans down and kisses Grace’s head, her wet face. “Have you been bottling this up all summer?”

Grace can’t help the terrible, monstrous laugh that erupts from her. “I think I’ve been bottling this up for a lot longer than a summer.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know,” Grace finds herself snapping. “Maybe because you’re always searching the world for peace and clarity, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”

“Okay,” Mom says. She tenses slightly. “Maybe I deserve that, and I’m sorry, Porter. I haven’t always been around like I should have been, but I’m here now. Let me help.”

Grace sniffs.

“Let me help,” she whispers fiercely. “Let me try. Tell me how it’s gotten this bad.”

A million years ago, Yuki told Grace she needed to get her head out of the clouds. To look down, and see all the people down here, wanting to be with her. Grace looks, and Mom is waiting. She wasn’t always, but she is right now, and Grace decides in this moment, that is good enough.

“I got married,” she breathes out. “I got so drunk in Las Vegas, I met a girl, and she made me laugh, and we kissed and danced. Then I married her.”

“Jesus—”

“That’s the good part,” she says. “It was stupid and reckless, but it’s not the bad. It was never the bad.”

“What is, then?” Mom asks. Her voice strains with caution. “If it’s not the—the drunk marriage in Vegas, and Jesus Christ, Porter, I don’t know how it’s not—what is?”

What is?

Here is the thing about the tar, the sludge, the inky black poison. Once it starts its ascent out of your body, there is nothing you can do to stop it. It tastes like volcano ash and fire, and you must taste it, and gag on it, and ultimately, you must spit it out. There comes a time when you cannot swallow it down any longer.

Everything that is buried will be unburied. Everything that is pushed down will find its way out. It is the way of the universe.

Here is an origin story that Grace tries to forget: she was not always dedicated to being the perfect daughter. After her parents’ divorce, she was angry and spiteful and full of teenage rebellion. She did not want to be like Colonel, inflexible and regimented and reserved. She did not want to be like Mom, absent as she backpacked through country valleys searching for serenity and balance and her free spirit.

So, she acted out at school. She messed around with the wrong girls. She skipped class. She found herself at parties where the cops showed up, even though she knew how it could go. But Colonel and Mom would hate it, just like Grace hated being uprooted from Southbury and transplanted to the other side of the country.

It didn’t last long.

“Colonel was so mad,” Grace tells Mom. “I know you both talked about it, but he was so mad. So—disappointed.” Colonel sat her down at their dining room table. He was going through another round of physical therapy back then, and the last thing he needed was Grace’s insurrection.

Through pain and gritted teeth, he laid down copies of her transcripts. He laid down a copy of a police report that said Grace was disorderly and trespassing. He laid down college admissions packets and a bulleted list.

This is your plan, he said, which you will stick to, and I mean every goddamn letter of it, Porter. I’ve worked too hard to watch you throw away your future. Do you understand?

Yes, sir, she said, and that had been the birthplace, the true beginning, of Grace Porter’s Grand Plan. Everything else fell to the wayside. She would be the Porter her father expected. She would be the Porter that did not burden her mother’s newfound tranquility quest.

“So you felt obligation and guilt,” Mom says. “God, Porter, I thought you just loved astronomy, that’s why you became so single-minded about it.”

Grace closes her eyes and remembers. It wasn’t until that first astronomy course that she thought, The universe has everything mapped out for me. I cannot go wrong, because I am it, and it is me. It is a plan, but not Colonel’s, she thought. This is a plan I can do myself. I can prove to him that I can do it myself.